Time magazine’s Vivienne Walt reports that some experts on the ground in Mali say many of the manuscripts were saved before the Islamists’ pillage:

Realizing that the documents might be prime targets for pillaging or vindictive attacks from Islamic extremists, staff left behind just a small portion of them, perhaps out of haste, but also to conceal the fact that the center had been deliberately emptied.

‘The documents which had been there are safe, they were not burned,’ Mahmoud Zouber, Mali’s presidential aide on Islamic affairs, told Time, ‘They were put in a very safe place.’

Other experts confirmed that while there were ‘a few items’ in the Ahmed Baba library, the rest were protected in an undisclosed hiding place.

Here’s a look at why the world is so worked up over the documents and what it might mean if they were destroyed:

It occurs to me that if I lived in one of these countries experiencing this kind of turmoil from religious extremists, I’d be one of the gun-people building arsenals and killing fanatics to protect my country.

I suspect that a lot of the gun people building arsenals here, think they’re in that kind of country, despite the fact that they themselves are the religious extremists that our country may need defense against one day. This happens because religious extremists actually think sane people are extreme.